McCaffery: Eagles' collapse a team effort

PHILADELPHIA — The Eagles’ season was crooked, fuzzy and out of focus long before Michael Vick held his head Sunday and retreated to the locker room with a concussion. It was blurry and wrong, painful and dangerous, a headache almost from Week 1.

Now, it’s been knocked out. And there is Andy Reid, still shaking his smelling-salts bag, only to find out that it’s finally empty.

The last chance to rescue a season — the ever-anticipated quarterback change — is not going to work any better than firing Juan Castillo. That’s what the Eagles learned Sunday at a critical moment in their season and their era, with a chance to move closer to the top of the NFC East in a confrontation with the Dallas Cowboys. That’s what they learned when the Vick crisis forced them to try Nick Foles. That’s what they should know after a 38-23 loss lengthened their losing streak to five games.

Other than cutting Brian Finneran again, there simply is nothing left for Andy Reid to try. That’s because not even Foles is going to work, not for these Eagles, not this season, not under that offensive system, not with that head coach.

“For not having practiced at all with the first group, I thought he came in and did some good things,” Reid said. “I think there are some plays that he’d like to have back. But he kept battling.”

Foles was not the only reason the Eagles lost Sunday. He wasn’t responsible for tackling. He didn’t commit a string of penalties. He didn’t disappear in punt coverage. He didn’t drop a single pass. He could be a fine NFL quarterback later. But when he entered Sunday with the score at 7-7 and finished the day 15 points in debt, accurate accounting would prove that he did too little to create a victory.

All along, or at least since Reid’s disastrous defensive-coordinator change, that was a reasonable Eagles’ fan’s fantasy. If nothing else, the Birds still had Foles, he of the intriguing preseason, of the big arm, of the younger, stronger legs. Were the season to tilt toward a cliff, that at least could be a sturdy tether — a way to win now, a hint at winning even more later.

But in his first regular-season opportunity, Foles was at best ordinary. And when it most mattered, he was a failure, twice turning the ball over in the fourth quarter for Dallas touchdowns.

So that is what it has come to for The Dynasty, the one Vick hinted at in the preseason. A quarterback yielding a dozen points worth of fourth-quarter turnovers is judged not by his jittery arm but by his stiff upper lip.

The teammates rolling out praise for their new quarterback, not just rolling their eyes, was a worthwhile in-house initiative. Vick is concussed, and that all but means he will not play Sunday in Washington. So Foles it will have to be for a while.

No, that is not how Reid had it planned. If he were going to try the rookie at all, it would have been later, in a last-hack effort to preserve whatever remains of his diminishing Eagles coaching legacy. But Vick was injured and Foles was next. And when that failed, too, there was only one more way to go. Reid probably knew that already. He has to know it now. He has no more escape hatches.

The only reasonable move now is a head-coaching change.

“To see how we are playing right now, this is not a reflection on Andy,” Celek said. “He is the head coach, but this is not his type of team right now. We have to play better as players. We need to play better. I just feel bad for him.”

On a day when one quarterback was exposed to one too many hits and another was exposed as ill-prepared for November NFC East football, the Eagles never looked so wobbly. And neither did their coach.